The Magicians полностью

Both Richard and Eliot seemed to want to extend the fight by another round, but Eliot, with an effort of will, allowed himself to be diverted.

“An excellent question.” Eliot pressed his hands to his temples. “I am receiving a divine vision from the Almighty Maker of . . . an exquisitely expensive small-batch bourbon . . . which God—or I’m sorry, the Makeress—has commanded me to render unto you forthwith.”

He stood up unsteadily and lurched in the direction of the kitchen.

Quentin found him sitting red-faced and sweating on a stool by an open window. Icy air was pouring in, but Eliot didn’t seem to notice. He stared out unblinking at the city, which receded in perspectival lines of lights fanning out into the blackness. He said nothing. He didn’t move as Quentin helped Richard manage the individual baked Alaskas—the trick, Richard explained, in his well-practiced explaining tone, was to make sure the meringue, an excellent heat insulator, formed a complete seal over the ice-cream core—and Quentin wondered if they’d lost Eliot for the evening. It wouldn’t be the first time he drank himself out of contention. But a few minutes later he rallied and trailed them back into the dining room with a slender, oddly shaped bottle sloshing with amber-colored whiskey.

Things were winding down. Everyone was treading carefully so as not to trigger another outburst from Eliot or another sermon from Richard. Not long afterward Josh left to take Anaïs home, and Richard retired of his own accord, leaving Quentin, Janet, and Eliot to preside woozily over the empty bottles and crumpled napkins. One of the candles had charred a hole in the tablecloth. Where was Alice? Had she gone home? Or crashed in one of the spare rooms? He tried her cell. No answer.

Eliot had dragged a pair of ottomans over to the table. He reclined on them Roman-style, though they were too low, so he had to reach up to get his drink, and all Quentin could see of him was his groping hand. Janet lay down, too, spooned up contentedly behind him.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Cheese,” Eliot said. “Do we have cheese? I need cheese.”

On cue Peggy Lee wandered through the opening verse of “Is That All There Is?” on the stereo. Which would be worse, Quentin wondered. If Richard was right, and there was an angry moral God, or if Eliot was right, and there was no point at all? If magic was created for a purpose, or if they could do whatever they wanted with it? Something like a panic attack came over him. They were really in trouble out here. There was nothing to hang on to. They couldn’t go on like this forever.

“There’s a Morbière in the kitchen,” he said. “It was supposed go with the theme—you know, the two layers, the morning milking, the night milking . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Janet said. “Fetch, Q. Go on.”

“I’ll go,” Eliot said, but instead of standing up he just rolled weakly off the couch and fell on the floor. His head made an ominously loud bonk as it hit the parquet.

But he was laughing as Quentin and Janet picked him up, Quentin getting his shoulders and Janet taking his feet, all thoughts of cheese extinguished, and maneuvered him out of the dining room and in the direction of his bedroom. On their way out the door Eliot’s head hit the door frame with another loud bonk, and then it was just too absolutely hilarious, and they all started laughing, and they laughed until they were completely useless, and Janet dropped his feet, and Quentin dropped his shoulders, and his head bonked on the floor again, and by this time it was a thousand times more funny than the first two times.

It took Quentin and Janet twenty minutes to get Eliot down the hall to his bedroom, lurching heavily against the walls with their arms around each other as if they were struggling down a flooded steerage-level corridor on the Titanic. The world had become smaller and somehow lighter—nothing meant anything, but what was meaning anyway but a burden that weighed them down? Eliot kept saying he was fine, and Quentin and Janet kept insisting they had to pick him up. Janet announced that she had peed herself, actually literally peed herself, she was laughing so hard. As they passed Richard’s door Eliot began a loud speech on the order of, “I am the mighty Maker, and I now bequeath to you My Holy Power Tools, because I am too fucking drunk to use them anymore, and good luck to you, because when I get up tomorrow they had better be exactly where I left them, exactly, even My . . . no, especially My belt sander, because I am going to be so fucking hungover tomorrow, anybody who fucks with My belt sander is going to get a taste of My belt. And it won’t taste good. At all.”